埃塞俄比亚航空客机坠毁 机上157人无人生还

We begin today with some terrible news. An Ethiopian Airlines plane carrying 157 people crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital.

The airline says all of the passengers and crew aboard are dead. NPR's Eyder Peralta has been following this story from his base in Nairobi. And he joins us now.

Eyder, good morning. What can you tell us about what happened? Good morning, Lulu. So this was a scheduled flight that was supposed to be going from Addis Ababa to Nairobi.

And the plane, which was a Boeing 737-8 MAX took off at 8:38. And by 8:44, so just a few minutes later, the plane had crashed.

The CEO of Ethiopian Airlines says that this was a brand new plane. They had just received it in November. And it was being flown by a senior pilot.

This morning, it had already flown from Johannesburg to Addis Ababa. And there were no remarks about something that was wrong with it.

And the pictures that are coming in from the scene are just remarkable. They show a huge crater, and not much of the plane is left.

As you mentioned, no one survived. And among the dead were 32 Kenyans, 18 Canadians, nine Ethiopians and eight Americans.

Ethiopian is a big airline, Eyder. What do we know about its safety record? It's a very safe airline. The last deadly crash was in 2010. It was weather-related.

Ethiopian is the pride of Ethiopia. It's state-owned. And it has had incredible growth in the past few years.